Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting, since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work is much less "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "Pelleas und Melisanda."
Richard Strauss's violin concerto can really be played by the violinist. The obbligatos in his symphonies are a very different matter; they go beyond accepted technical boundaries. With Stravinsky it is the same. The violin obbligato in Rimsky-Korsakov's Schéhérazade, though, is real violin music.
Upon the whole, these works make one see that, in spite of their apparent audacity, Strauss and Mahler are beginning to make a surreptitious retreat from their early standpoint, and are abandoning the symphony with a programme. Strauss's last work will lose nothing by calling itself quite simply Sinfonia Domestica, without adding any further information.
He says he thinks Wagner's music and Strauss's intimately characteristic of modern Germany: the noise, the sugary sentimentality making the public weep tears of melted sugar, he said, the brutal glorification of force, the all-conquering swagger, the exaggeration of emotions, the big gloom.
Strauss's book, in that of France M. Renan's book, the book of Bishop Colenso is the critical hit in the religious literature of England. Bishop Colenso's book reposes on a total misconception of the essential elements of the religious problem, as that problem is now presented for solution.
When, for instance, he tells us, "it would also argue ingratitude towards my genius if I were not to rejoice that to the faculty of an incisive, analytical criticism was added the innocent pleasure in artistic production," it may astonish him to hear that, in spite of this self-praise, there are still men who maintain exactly the reverse, and who say, not only that he has never possessed the gift of artistic production, but that the "innocent" pleasure he mentions is of all things the least innocent, seeing that it succeeded in gradually undermining and ultimately destroying a nature as strongly and deeply scholarly and critical as Strauss's in fact, the real Straussian Genius.
Strauss's liking to present, by musical pictures, sometimes a character, sometimes a dialogue, or a situation, or a landscape, or an idea that is to say, the most volatile and varied impressions of his capricious spirit is very marked here.
But too often the music is superficial and conventional, and the tyranny of Wagner makes itself felt a rare enough occurrence in Strauss's other works. The poem is interesting; Strauss has put much of himself into it, and one is conscious of the crisis that unsettled his broad-minded but often self-satisfied and inconsistent ideas.
WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT. These are conveniently divided into three groups, corresponding to the three periods of her life. The first group includes all her early essays and miscellaneous work, from her translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu, in 1846, to her union with Lewes in 1854.
Her first important literary work was the translation of Strauss's "Life of Jesus" in 1844, and shortly after her father's death in 1849 she was writing in the "Westminster Review." It was not until 1856 that George Eliot settled down to the writing of novels.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking